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Very interesting. Does anyone know if Magic Carpet by Bullfrog used a similar technique for rendering its terrain?
by burn_cycle 5y ago
Very interesting. Does anyone know if Magic Carpet by Bullfrog used a similar technique for rendering its terrain?
- Delk 5y agoI don't know, but based on a gameplay video it looks more like vector graphics to me. The terrain silhouette seems to have straight lines. I don't know how they pulled that terrain rendering off with 1994 hardware. The limited rendering distance probably helps.
- ahartmetz 5y agoI seem to remember that Magic Carpet was a massive hardware hog and that it ran marginally well on the best you could buy in 1994. That was something like a Pentium 90.
- burn_cycle 5y ago>I seem to remember that Magic Carpet was a massive hardware hog I'm not sure about that. A quick search shows that the (on the box) requirements were 33mhz 486, which seems to have been fairly reasonable for the time.
- moogly 5y agoI don't have a source to back me up here, but IIRC, Magic Carpet used texture-mapped polygons. Maybe fun trivia: James Schmalz trying to replicate Magic Carpet in pure assembly language and showing it to Tim Sweeney resulted in the embryo of UnrealEd and what later became the Unreal engine.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoNo, it's a polygon renderer of some sort. But it is quite restricted. Each "world" is a sphere, and checking again in a youtube video, it looks to me like the sphere has a regular tessellation. It's dynamic though: some of the game mechanics raise or level hills. I'd guess they found a way to special case a lot of the rasterization given the spherical restriction. Kinda like how Descent based everything off intersections of a unit cube.